Touchpad scrolling on Dell Inspiron 17R SE (N7220)

I was able to find a workaround that's almost good enough to be called a solution. It is possible to emulate a scroll wheel while holding down both the left and the right mouse button. They have to pressed simultaneously, but this should be easy enough on a laptop that allows you to press both of them with a single finger. Follow these steps to make it work.

1. Open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type

   sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings
   

2. There should be a new utility called "Pointing devices". Since I use Gnome Classic, it's located under Applications -> System Tools -> Preferences, but you should be able to search for it in Unity.
3. Select "Use middle button emulation" and select a short timeout, unless your laptop already has three buttons. This will trigger the "middle button" whenever you press both buttons at once.
4. Select "Use wheel emulation" as well as vertical/horizontal scrolling to your liking.
5. Select button 3. This tells the system to use the "middle button" you just created for scrolling.
6. Adjust the timeout and inertia sliders for wheel emulation to the settings you find optimal.

If it takes to long for the "scrolling mode" to activate, you need to reduce the timeout. On the other hand, if scrolling is activated instead of middle clicking, you need to increase it. Select a value that suits you. I keep this one slightly to the left of the middle.

The inertia slider adjusts the scrolling speed. The more inertia, the slower your scrolling will be. For me, this slider is very close to the left end, and has to be adjusted very carefully.

That's it. Whenever you hold down both buttons, you should be able to scroll using the touchpad. As an added bonus you will get the middle button, which is good for a lot of things such as pasting text in the terminal and opening websites in new tabs.

I have the same problem, unfortunately there is still no support for that touchpad in Linux.I've found this bug-report thread interesting to read.

Otherwise the bug for Ubuntu is reported here.

Although this bug involves a lot of different devices some of them are supported in recent kernels.

EDIT: Support for this touchpad is now already done. Download the information about it here.

Please take a look at this thread

Support for Inspiron 17R SE is getting closer thanks to Dave Turvene's work. Scrolling already works for me, two-finger support still missing, but it is a work in progress making headway.

To set up the Nvidia 650m just run from console:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

That should download the latest release.

I am also troubled by the lack of touchpad. I am just dark that I did not research the manufacturing company of the touchpad in new Dell machines.

We would expect however at some stage the psmouse kernel module will be updated for these new devices once open source can reverse engineer the multitouch instructions.

I managed to get my touchpad working with two finger scrolling. It is also not so annoying when typing - although not completely disabled. Fn + F3 now disables/enables the touchpad where this didn't work before.

I used the info as put together here Geek-Tips Ubuntu 13.04 on Inspiron 17R

See point 2.

Copying from there:

1) Start by downloading the latest source code package from http://www.dahetral.com/public-download

2)

sudo apt-get install dkms
tar -xf psmouse-alps-X.X.tbz
sudo mv usr/src/psmouse-alps-X.X/ /usr/src/psmouse-alps-X.X/
sudo dkms add psmouse/alps-X.X
sudo dkms autoinstall
sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse